Organizations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have prepared extensive nationwide flood maps that categorize regions into flood insurance rate zones. For example, a “Zone A” region indicates that the region is more susceptible to flooding than a “Zone X” region. During the course of virtually every real estate transaction, one or more of the parties to the transaction needs to determine whether or not a given structure or piece of real property lies within an area that is susceptible to flooding. For example, a lender may use that information to condition a loan on the purchase of flood insurance, an insurance agent may use that information to quote and/or sell flood insurance, a residential home developer may use that information in planning the layout of home sites, a potential buyer may use that information in calculating an offer price, and a professional such as an appraiser or surveyor might use that information in preparation of an appraisal or survey.
A party interested in flood information typically relies on a service provider to perform a flood zone determination. Using the street address of the property, the service provider locates the address on special maps to determine the flood insurance rate zone for that address. However, manual determination of a flood zone is a time-consuming process, and service providers have developed complex computer software in an attempt to automate flood zone determinations.
Automated flood zone determination involves two steps. In the first step, a user enters a street address into special geocoding software which determines the longitude and latitude coordinates associated with the given street address. Methods of geocoding are known in the art. In the second step, special flood zone determination software uses the longitude and latitude coordinates to find the location in a database of digitized flood zone maps. Methods of flood zone determinations are known in the art. For example, American Flood Research Inc. uses third party geocoding software to convert a street address into a corresponding longitude and latitude, and then uses proprietary flood zone determination software to correlate the latitude/longitude to one of the FEMA flood insurance rate zones.
However, there are several known deficiencies in the current automated flood zone determination systems. First, not every location has a precise street address. In some rural locations, houses may be identified only by a mailing address, for example, “Route 4 Box 17.” Or, in an area under development, there simply may be no street name available. Second, even where there is a known street address, the system is still subject to human error. A user entering the address may transpose digits, enter the wrong street name/type, or enter the wrong city or state. For example, “100 Main Street, Ada, Okla.” and “100 Main Street, Ada, Ohio” are both actual addresses, but are separated by nearly a thousand miles. Third, a large plot of land, having a single street address, may encompass multiple flood zones that may or may not affect the actual structure. For example, there may be a creek bed several hundred feet away and thirty feet lower in elevation from the proposed home site. The system will be unable to respond to the request automatically, and, without manual intervention, the service provider will run the risk of an inaccurate flood determination. Fourth, in practice, while an interested party may make an in-field inspection of the property, in most instances, the party must return to the office to prepare and send the flood determination request to the service provider, or the party, if not using a flood zone determination service provider, will have to identify the appropriate flood insurance rate map and then locate the structure or property on that map. This creates additional paperwork which must be manually filed, it creates additional opportunities for data-entry errors, and it adds to the amount of time required to obtain the flood zone determination. Fifth, the special geocoding software is not foolproof, and on occasion, may not return the precise latitude and longitude coordinates for a given street address; while the geocoding software might allow manual correction of the coordinates using, for example, a satellite map overlay, this is time consuming and still subject to human error.
Therefore, what is needed in an automated flood determination system is a mechanism that not only speeds up the process but provides precise latitude and longitude coordinates for all real properties, thus eliminating the need for geocoding, which is limited to geocodable addresses and has the potential for geocoding errors, and eliminating the need for any manual intervention for locating real property.